Bungie shows us a taste of the Halo 3 single-player, as well the strong movie- …

Bungie gave us a short 20-minute section of play from the campaign of Halo 3, and the game looks pretty solid. You're also fighting alongside the Arbiter in the demo we saw, which we were informed happens about a one third of the way into the game. Apparently the opening scenes contained spoilers they weren't comfortable showing us. I liked the new damage effects: there is a mesh-like effect you see whenever you're shot to simulate your armor. It was nice to see the single-player in action; at this stage we're all tired of videos and teasers.

The thing that stood out about the demo was the video editing suite the game ships with: in the full version you're able to view your videos in third-person, zooming around to take in the action. At any time you can freeze the action to see the explosions and flying bodies in great detail, or zoom around for a Matrix-like effect. We were also told the video feature would have light camera scripting, so you could move the camera here and there and save that data; in essence "directing" how others will view the videos. You can then upload your creations to Xbox Live or keep them on your hard drive.

Since the videos are saved using game data, you're able to save a surprising amount in full quality in little storage: the five-minute file we were shown was about 5MB. Unfortunately this means that you can't export the files to your computer, but Bungie told us that you could capture the video out from the system; they seem to be very eager to get a strong movie-making community built up around the game. With these tools, I expect to see some mind-blowing stuff from the Internet after the game ships.

Another cool feature is the ability to take screenshots which you will then be able to upload to Bungie.net and put in a custom album to share around. Very nice. The demonstration we were shown also seemed to pause the sound as well, so putting the camera near explosions made a low rumble come through the speakers. The Spartan laser made a crackling noise as well; it's fun having a little audio snapshot of whatever's happening on screen.

As they paused the action, we also saw glimpses of a Spartan with a familiar-looking weapon... which we were told Bungie had no comment on. Of course, we saw this twice, and if we didn't take notes the first time, the second time we definitely knew we were being shown something. So we can officially say it: the gravity hammer is going to be in multiplayer. How cool is that? This is the weapon Tartarus was slinging around in Halo 2, and since the Brutes will be the Covenant's new go-to guys in Halo 3 instead of the Elites, this makes sense.

It's a rather obvious way to "leak" this announcement to us, but judging by the frantic note-taking, everyone else was as excited about this weapon as I was.